It's been almost 9 months since I created my own smart home, with a few tools and lines of code. But I planned to take it to the next step, and today, I want to explain the concept, how it works and basically everything else.

Smart Homes are not what you see everyday, which is what makes them special.

I started this project back in May 2016. Back then, I just wanted to be able to turn the lights off in my room, and wouldn't have to go all the way across the room to do it.

I came across a WiFi Light Bulb online and thought it'd be a good idea to try it out. I had already used an old Samsung Smart Phone running AOSP and Tasker which would always be on, showing the time and my calendar events, and was connected to a set of speakers and Google was there to respond to my commands, so it was kinda like a Google Home, sort of thing.

When I bought the bulb, I used tasker and some plugins to have Google Now run custom commands such as Lights and voice activated the light bulb.

Later on I used the IR Blaster that came with the phone to control the TV in my room, and later on even my Air Conditioner. With all of these voice activated, I thought to myself that it'd be easy to use my real phone and send short text messages to the old phone in my room and have it control my room remotely. I remember the hot summer day that I first tested it 10 mins before I got home so when I came into my room, the lights were already on and the AC was already cooling the room.

Then I decided to make an app, but had very little time at that point, so I just made a simple app with some buttons that got the job done. But when I started experimenting with Xamarin, I decided to make the app from scratch. So I did, and added material design to it, added some more features, added custom themes and anything else I could think of. Right now the app can turn the lights on or off, set the lights brightness, turn the TV on or off, switch TV's inputs, change the TV's brightness, play some music using Spotify, mess around with the AC and also, I managed to set another old Smart Phone in my room as a Remote Camera to check on everything. But making it available for production, is something that I don't find worth the time it takes.

I may want to try and have my door open up automatically, and who knows, maybe someday I will.